Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [170]
“Avancez,” Guizot ordered again. He broke out of the trees onto a shallow terrace of red earth: more broken cornstalks and the branches of uprooted manioc, stripped of its tubers. On the other side of the provision ground, half a dozen men and the woman with the bow were hurrying away, toward a black cliff wall that towered above. There they must certainly be brought to bay. Guizot put on speed, stumbling over the soggy ground. He had outdistanced all his men, except Sergeant Aloyse, never mind the arrow wagging in his arm. Where he’d imagined the ambushers must turn and make a stand, they were going up the cliff wall with scarcely a break in their pace, springing nimbly from foothold to foothold, stone to stone. All were barefoot, though one wore a complete uniform of the Fifth Colonial. In his effort to follow, Guizot had to scramble on hands and knees, sword blade banging over the rocks. The ascent was nearly vertical, and he was winded now, pouring sweat through his wool clothing. He could feel an apoplectic heat in his face. The wagging arrow shaft snagged on a bush and the shock of pain brought him up short.
Sergeant Aloyse braced a hand between his shoulder blades to support him from below. Guizot could hear a whistle in his breathing. The ambushers were going up the cliff wall as easily as spiders, still walking upright over angles that Guizot could not have managed by worming along on his belly. He watched the swing of the woman’s mud-clotted skirt as she climbed.
The ambushers were pulling themselves over a horseshoe rim on the cliff top a hundred feet above, into a burst of yellow sunlight among ancient, vine-tangled trees. Guizot stuck his sword into a crack between two rocks and began to recharge his pistol. He took a slow aim, bracing right hand over left, at the man who wore the uniform. Then something oblong blocked the light: a chunk of log dropped toward them. Guizot flinched to avoid it, pressing himself into the stone; the log fell past and splintered on boulders below. He straightened and raised his pistol again. The woman had laid aside her bow to lift a naked infant to her shoulder. Over the child’s bare back, she looked down on Guizot. He had a sense of calm appraisal, though she was much too far away for him to see her face. Behind her, one of the men put a conch shell to his lips and sounded it; there was that skirling sound from the night before. Guizot held his fire. Another of the ambushers took hold of the woman’s hand and drew her away from the cliff rim, out of sight.
A spill of clear water ran down the black rock. All firing had stopped and in the damp silence Guizot heard the trickle of the spring. A throbbing of drums began, above the cliff wall, answered by others on the far side of the gorge. Vines hung down from the lip of the cliff, their small round leaves dotting the black rock with leaves. A few dozen white butterflies floated up the cliff wall from below, spiraling like smoke in a chimney.
Guizot holstered his pistol and caught hold of his sword hilt, loosening the blade from between the rocks. The sergeant’s hand came away from his back, and he turned, awkwardly, making ready to descend. His men were beginning to gather on the terraces below, looking up at him and Aloyse curiously. His arm began to throb in time with the drums, and he saw that the sergeant’s eyes were narrowed on the spot where the arrow shaft had pierced his woolen sleeve, the bloodstain widening with his pulse.
Sergeant Aloyse was determined to keep his captain safe from the regimental sawbones. He called on a friend from another company, who’d survived Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign. The Egyptian